Constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) model scenarios of sequential decision making with multiple objectives that are increasingly important in many applications. However, the model is often unknown and must be learned online while still ensuring the constraint is met, or at least the violation is bounded with time. Some recent papers have made progress on this very challenging problem but either need unsatisfactory assumptions such as knowledge of a safe policy, or have high cumulative regret. We propose the Safe PSRL (posterior sampling-based RL) algorithm that does not need such assumptions and yet performs very well, both in terms of theoretical regret bounds as well as empirically. The algorithm achieves an efficient tradeoff between exploration and exploitation by use of the posterior sampling principle, and provably suffers only bounded constraint violation by leveraging the idea of pessimism. Our approach is based on a primal-dual approach. We establish a sub-linear $\tilde{\mathcal{ O}}\left(H^{2.5} \sqrt{|\mathcal{S}|^2 |\mathcal{A}| K} \right)$ upper bound on the Bayesian reward objective regret along with a bounded, i.e., $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\left(1\right)$ constraint violation regret over $K$ episodes for an $|\mathcal{S}|$-state, $|\mathcal{A}|$-action and horizon $H$ CMDP.

Important challenges in retinal microsurgery include prolonged operating time, inadequate force feedback, and poor depth perception due to a constrained top-down view of the surgery. The introduction of robot-assisted technology could potentially deal with such challenges and improve the surgeon's performance. Motivated by such challenges, this work develops a strategy for autonomous needle navigation in retinal microsurgery aiming to achieve precise manipulation, reduced end-to-end surgery time, and enhanced safety. This is accomplished through real-time geometry estimation and chance-constrained Model Predictive Control (MPC) resulting in high positional accuracy while keeping scleral forces within a safe level. The robotic system is validated using both open-sky and intact (with lens and partial vitreous removal) ex vivo porcine eyes. The experimental results demonstrate that the generation of safe control trajectories is robust to small motions associated with head drift. The mean navigation time and scleral force for MPC navigation experiments are 7.208 s and 11.97 mN, which can be considered efficient and well within acceptable safe limits. The resulting mean errors along lateral directions of the retina are below 0.06 mm, which is below the typical hand tremor amplitude in retinal microsurgery.

One of the primary means of sea exploration is autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). To perform these tasks, AUVs must navigate the rough challenging sea environment. AUVs usually employ an inertial navigation system (INS), aided by a Doppler velocity log (DVL), to provide the required navigation accuracy. The DVL transmits four acoustic beams to the seafloor, and by measuring changes in the frequency of the returning beams, the DVL can estimate the AUV velocity vector. However, in practical scenarios, not all the beams are successfully reflected. When only three beams are available, the accuracy of the velocity vector is degraded. When fewer than three beams are reflected, the DVL cannot estimate the AUV velocity vector. This paper presents a data-driven approach, MissBeamNet, to regress the missing beams in partial DVL beam measurement cases. To that end, a deep neural network (DNN) model is designed to process the available beams along with past DVL measurements to regress the missing beams. The AUV velocity vector is estimated using the available measured and regressed beams. To validate the proposed approach, sea experiments were made with the "Snapir" AUV, resulting in an 11 hours dataset of DVL measurements. Our results show that the proposed system can accurately estimate velocity vectors in situations of missing beam measurements. Our dataset and codebase implementing the described framework is available at our GitHub repository https://github.com/ansfl/MissBeamNet .

The fourth industrial revolution creates ubiquitous sensor data in production plants. To generate maximum value out of these data, reliable and precise time series-based machine learning methods like temporal neural networks are needed. This paper proposes a novel sequence-to-sequence deep learning architecture for time series segmentation called PrecTime which tries to combine the concepts and advantages of sliding window and dense labeling approaches. The general-purpose architecture is evaluated on a real-world industry dataset containing the End-of-Line testing sensor data of hydraulic pumps. We are able to show that PrecTime outperforms five implemented state-of-the-art baseline networks based on multiple metrics. The achieved segmentation accuracy of around 96% shows that PrecTime can achieve results close to human intelligence in operational state segmentation within a testing cycle.

Calculation of Bayesian posteriors and model evidences typically requires numerical integration. Bayesian quadrature (BQ), a surrogate-model-based approach to numerical integration, is capable of superb sample efficiency, but its lack of parallelisation has hindered its practical applications. In this work, we propose a parallelised (batch) BQ method, employing techniques from kernel quadrature, that possesses an empirically exponential convergence rate. Additionally, just as with Nested Sampling, our method permits simultaneous inference of both posteriors and model evidence. Samples from our BQ surrogate model are re-selected to give a sparse set of samples, via a kernel recombination algorithm, requiring negligible additional time to increase the batch size. Empirically, we find that our approach significantly outperforms the sampling efficiency of both state-of-the-art BQ techniques and Nested Sampling in various real-world datasets, including lithium-ion battery analytics.

Soft labels in image classification are vector representations of an image's true classification. In this paper, we investigate soft labels in the context of satellite object detection. We propose using detections as the basis for a new dataset of soft labels. Much of the effort in creating a high-quality model is gathering and annotating the training data. If we could use a model to generate a dataset for us, we could not only rapidly create datasets, but also supplement existing open-source datasets. Using a subset of the xView dataset, we train a YOLOv5 model to detect cars, planes, and ships. We then use that model to generate soft labels for the second training set which we then train and compare to the original model. We show that soft labels can be used to train a model that is almost as accurate as a model trained on the original data.

Transfer learning for partial differential equations (PDEs) is to develop a pre-trained neural network that can be used to solve a wide class of PDEs. Existing transfer learning approaches require much information of the target PDEs such as its formulation and/or data of its solution for pre-training. In this work, we propose to construct transferable neural feature spaces from purely function approximation perspectives without using PDE information. The construction of the feature space involves re-parameterization of the hidden neurons and uses auxiliary functions to tune the resulting feature space. Theoretical analysis shows the high quality of the produced feature space, i.e., uniformly distributed neurons. Extensive numerical experiments verify the outstanding performance of our method, including significantly improved transferability, e.g., using the same feature space for various PDEs with different domains and boundary conditions, and the superior accuracy, e.g., several orders of magnitude smaller mean squared error than the state of the art methods.

Small teams in the field can benefit from the capabilities provided by small Uncrewed Aerial Systems (sUAS) for missions such as reconnaissance, hostile attribution, remote emplacement, and search and rescue. The mobility, communications, and flexible payload capacity of sUAS can offer teams new levels of situational awareness and enable more highly coordinated missions than previously possible. However, piloting such aircraft for specific missions draws personnel away from other mission-critical tasks, increasing the load on remaining personnel while also increasing complexity of operations. For wider adoption and use of sUAS for security and humanitarian missions, safe and robust autonomy must be employed to reduce this burden on small teams. In this paper, we present the development of the Collaborative-UAS for Hostile Attribution, Surveillance, Emplacement, and Reconnaissance (CHASER) testbed, for rapidly prototyping capabilities that will reduce strain on small teams through sensor-guided autonomous control. We attempt to address autonomy needs unfilled by commercial sUAS platforms by creating and testing a series of composable modules that can be configured to support multiple missions. Methods implemented and presented here include radar track correlation, on-board computer vision target detection, target position estimation, closed-loop relative position control, and efficient search of a 3D volume for target acquisition. We configure and test a series of these modules in an example mission, executing a fully autonomous chase of an intruding sUAS in live flight, and demonstrating the success of the modularized autonomy approach. We present performance results from simulation or live flight tests for each module. Lastly, we describe the software architecture that we have developed for flexible controls and comment on how the capabilities presented may enable additional missions.

Precise load forecasting in buildings could increase the bill savings potential and facilitate optimized strategies for power generation planning. With the rapid evolution of computer science, data-driven techniques, in particular the Deep Learning models, have become a promising solution for the load forecasting problem. These models have showed accurate forecasting results; however, they need abundance amount of historical data to maintain the performance. Considering the new buildings and buildings with low resolution measuring equipment, it is difficult to get enough historical data from them, leading to poor forecasting performance. In order to adapt Deep Learning models for buildings with limited and scarce data, this paper proposes a Building-to-Building Transfer Learning framework to overcome the problem and enhance the performance of Deep Learning models. The transfer learning approach was applied to a new technique known as Transformer model due to its efficacy in capturing data trends. The performance of the algorithm was tested on a large commercial building with limited data. The result showed that the proposed approach improved the forecasting accuracy by 56.8% compared to the case of conventional deep learning where training from scratch is used. The paper also compared the proposed Transformer model to other sequential deep learning models such as Long-short Term Memory (LSTM) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). The accuracy of the transformer model outperformed other models by reducing the root mean square error to 0.009, compared to LSTM with 0.011 and RNN with 0.051.

Real-world deep learning models developed for Time Series Forecasting are used in several critical applications ranging from medical devices to the security domain. Many previous works have shown how deep learning models are prone to adversarial attacks and studied their vulnerabilities. However, the vulnerabilities of time series models for forecasting due to adversarial inputs are not extensively explored. While the attack on a forecasting model might aim to deteriorate the performance of the model, it is more effective, if the attack is focused on a specific impact on the model's output. In this paper, we propose a novel formulation of Directional, Amplitudinal, and Temporal targeted adversarial attacks on time series forecasting models. These targeted attacks create a specific impact on the amplitude and direction of the output prediction. We use the existing adversarial attack techniques from the computer vision domain and adapt them for time series. Additionally, we propose a modified version of the Auto Projected Gradient Descent attack for targeted attacks. We examine the impact of the proposed targeted attacks versus untargeted attacks. We use KS-Tests to statistically demonstrate the impact of the attack. Our experimental results show how targeted attacks on time series models are viable and are more powerful in terms of statistical similarity. It is, hence difficult to detect through statistical methods. We believe that this work opens a new paradigm in the time series forecasting domain and represents an important consideration for developing better defenses.